instances after 1850.

In the meantime, the Latin American nations were

puzzled by U. S. policies and actions which often revealed U.S.

U.S.

a disturbing ambivalence of purpose in Latin American affairs. The good will flowing from early U. S. recognition turned sour as a result of U.S. interventions in Mexico, Cuba, Panama, Haiti, Santo Domingo, and Nicaragua. The United States that invaded Mexico in 1846-1848 pressured Napoleon III in 1865 to abandon his support of the Hapsburg puppet he had installed on a Mexican throne. The United States that invaded the island of Cuba to free the last Spanish colony in the Western Hemisphere itself often intervened in the island nation's affairs over the next quarter of a century. The United States that used the Roosevelt Corollary as a reason or an excuse for intervention in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua two decades later, in the self-denying Clark Memorandum, abandoned its announced claim to the right to intervene. And shortly thereafter it inaugurated the then-revolutionary policy of the "Good Neighbor."

What prompted such an abrupt about-face on the part of the United States in the matter of national policy in

concept on the part of the United States of its role in the Western Hemisphere, and in part from its experience in World War I when the United States found relatively little active support for its war aims among the Latin American nations. Just how much this Latin American position of isolation influenced the United States in its search for a new approach to hemispheric defense can only be surmised. But consciously or unconsciously in its new approach to hemispheric problems as demonstrated in the inter-American conferences of Santiago, Chile (1923), Havana (1928), Washington (1928-29), Montevideo (1933), and Buenos Aires (1936) the United States set the stage for its attempt, in the conference held at Lima (1938), to win the sister American nations to assume the joint responsibility of the defense of the Western Hemisphere. In this it was only partially successful, for the delegates at Lima would do no more than adopt a weak declaration to this effect, and the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 found the hemisphere without any cooperative defense plans.

Although the Panama

Consultation of Foreign Ministers in October 1939 pro

claimed a 300-mile neutrality zone around the Americas,

it remained for the Havana Conference of 1940 to adopt

the Declaration of Reciprocal Assistance and Cooperation

for the Defense of the Nations of the Americas, the "first inter-American security instrument aimed specifically" against European aggressors. 1

As the invasion of the Low Countries by Hitler's

troops in April 1940 set the stage for the Havana Conference, so the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor prepared the way for the Rio de Janeiro Conference of January 1942 in which the delegates adopted a resolution recommending that the nations represented sever diplomatic relations with the The conference also created the Inter-American Defense Board (with headquarters in Washington) and the Emergency Advisory Committee for Political Defense, an organization designed to combat sabotage, espionage, and subversive propaganda. Five years later (August 1947)

Axis powers.

delegates assembled in the second so-called Rio Conference (although held in the former gambling palace of Quitandinha near Petropolis) and drafted the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance which endorsed the principle of the use of armed force, if necessary, to halt aggression, a principle that had been included in the Act of Chapultepec signed by the American nations in Mexico City in 1945.

States succeeded in securing an individual commitment of each Latin American nation to hemispheric defense. From the adoption of the Rio Treaty to the present date these nations have honored their commitments, except for Cuba which Castro has led into the Communist camp.

1

1j. Lloyd Mecham, The United States and Inter-American

J.

Security, 1889-1960 (Austin:

P. 189.

Univ. of Texas Press, 1961),

IN WORLD WAR II

From the moment of the outbreak of the war in Europe

in September 1939 the United States acted to protect its interests in the Western Hemisphere. On 5 September, four days after Hitler invaded Poland, the United States established a neutrality patrol to track and report on any belligerent forces, airborne or naval (either surface or underwater), which approached the coasts of the United States or the West Indies.1 From this tentative beginning the U. S. effort grew into a massive program of antisubmarine and coastal defense operations that required the services of more than 100,000 U. S. troops alone merely to man land defense installations in the Latin American area. In the process it also employed numerous naval forces and received the assistance of Latin American troops in air and naval base support activities and the active participation of naval forces of several Latin American nations in antisubmarine operations. The task unilaterally undertaken by the United States was increased enormously and made a multilateral one when the Consultation of Foreign Ministers, on 3 October 1939, adopted the Declaration of Panama, which proclaimed the establishment from Canada to